Word of Life Church Podcast

Jesus was faithful. Jesus remains faithful. Jesus will be faithful. This theme of faithfulness is the foundation of Paul's view of how God intends to save the world through sending his Son. To see the the faithfulness of Jesus in the New Testament requires a proper understanding of the big story the Bible is telling, a four-act story of Creation, Corruption, Covenant, and New Creation. With that story in mind, we can see the faithfulness of Jesus in Paul's description of the death of Jesus in Romans 3:21-24. Through his faithfulness, God declares us justified, and thus incorporated into the covenant people of God.

Why did Jesus die? Why was he tortured? Why was he crucified? Why was he murdered? To answer these questions, you must first answer this question: Who Killed Jesus? This much must be made clear: God did not kill Jesus! To suggest God tortured and murdered his Son is to malign the character of God. God sent his Son into a world founded on a sinful and satanic system of blame and violence to bear witness to divine love and to save us from death and the ways of death. Jesus sacrificially laid down his life, but it was not a suicide. At the cross, human religion and politics committed homicide. The sacrificial killing of Jesus is not what God required; it's what we required.

We don’t preach the Bible, we preach Jesus. We use the Bible to preach Jesus. The difference between preaching the Bible and preaching Jesus is the difference between Christianity and Biblicism. The difference between Christianity and Biblicism is the difference between following a book and following our risen Lord. Philip didn’t preach the Bible, he preached Jesus. He used the Bible to preach Jesus. The Bible has never saved anyone. It’s Jesus who saves. The Bible is the means, but Jesus is the end!

We Christians are a most peculiar people. Why? Because we worship a crucified God. Other religions worship a an omnipotent God, a glorious God, a victorious God—but we worship a crucified God! The death of Jesus upon the cross was murder. It was a lynching. It was a mob killing that God knew would happen because of our sin, but he did not will it. What God willed was that through his death Jesus would save us from sin and death. God crucified. The giver of life put to death. The Creator crucified by his creation. This is the greatest scandal of all time.

The Transfiguration is the high point of the narrative arc in the synoptic gospels. Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the mountain where he was praying. This is the moment It is when the divinity of Jesus was revealed to Peter, James, John. The Transfiguration moment is where the Old Testament hands the project over to Jesus, where Moses and Elijah find their great successor, and where the old witness of the Hebrew scriptures truly becomes the new witness of the New Testament.

Special Guest Terry Wildman is a Native American and the head of Rain Song Ministries, a Christian organization ministering to the indigenous people of North America. In this special sermon, Terry Wildman describes the current plight of Native Americans and offers a perspective of an appropriate Christian response.

Pastor Brian Zahnd recently made a blog post that received considerable attention, entitled, "My Problem With The Bible". It has been shared over 17,000 times on Facebook, 700+ tweets on Twitter, and been reposted on numerous blogs across the internet. Obviously, he has hit on something that a lot of people resonate with. In this sermon, Pastor Brian shares that he is serious about the Bible, and wants to read it for all it's worth, but he has a problem with it. Discover what his problem is (and perhaps your problem too) in this sermon.

When we look to Scripture we discover God is the God of time who created time along with everything else in his creation. God existed before time. He is not bound by time, but rules over time. He entered into time through Jesus Christ. Time, as a part of God’s good creation, is sacred. One of the ways we can recover the sacredness of time is to organize it around Jesus himself. We mark the years by Jesus. This year is 2014 AD, with “AD” meaning the year of our Lord. We follow the church calendar in order to mark the months of the years around Jesus. We honor the sacredness of Sabbath because of the resurrection of Jesus and if we open ourselves, we find every moment to be sacred. Every moment opens up before us as an opportunity to acknowledge Jesus and make the moment-by-moment choice to obey him and not waste the time we have been given.

Jesus is presently building his church. We are called to walk in such a way as to build up the church, because we are one body, one church, one body of Christ. We work with Jesus to build up the church by consciously doing life together. God has made us in his image, in the image of the one God revealed in the distinct persons. We were created as distinct, unique individuals who are interconnected with other people. In the New Testament we find the recurring phrase "one another". This phrase tips us off to our responsibilities, the things we can do for one another as we live together, working to build a healthy, unified church.

The Bible opens with the story of God's work of creation. At the end of the first account of creation in Genesis the point is made emphatically: "...and behold, it was very good." Genesis 2 gives a second account of creation—this time the emphasis is on the human vocation. Creation was good, but it was incomplete. Adam was to work with God as a gardener, tending God’s good earth, cultivating it, caring for it, protecting it, and expanding it. The original human vocation was to work with God in the cultivation and care of God’s good earth. God gave Adam and Eve dominion over the earth in order to deputize them for the care and cultivation of the earth. But then sin happened, with catastrophic effects upon human identity and vocation. Not only did human beings begin to suffer, creation itself began to suffer. God's children commissioned with the care of God's good earth had turned bad.